Case Study

Finance360

Finance teams needed faster, more direct access to trusted financial data without waiting on manual analysis or cross-checking multiple tools. Finance360 helped establish a clearer source of truth for financial numbers, with AI-driven insights and a conversational interface that allowed users to interact with data and move from analysis to action with more confidence.

View the process See impact

All financial values, account names, and identifying details shown here are anonymized or represented as placeholders to protect confidential information.

Good morning, Sarah

Overview of current financial performance and activity.

Time Period: QX 20XX

View: Manager

AI data assistant Connected to trusted finance data

AI Ask a question about performance, variance, forecasts, or supporting detail... Explore data

Total Revenue

$XX.XM

Op. Expense

$XX.XM

Net Income

$XX.XM

Cash Balance

$XX.XM

Performance TrendQX

Expense CategoriesView

Category ACategory BCategory C

DescriptionCategoryStatusAmount

Invoice — Account ARevenueComplete$XX,XXX

Budget AdjustmentForecastReview$XX,XXX

Expense RequestOperationsPending$XX,XXX

Role & Team Lead Product Designer

Product, front-end & back-end engineering, and 6 designers (3 internal, 3 external).

ScopeEnterprise finance platform supporting reporting, workflows, trusted data access, and AI-assisted insights.

FocusData clarity, scalable patterns, design governance, usability, and conversational data exploration.

OutcomeEnabled direct access to trusted data—reducing reliance on analysts, improving confidence, and accelerating decisions with AI-driven insights.

The Challenge

Finance teams needed one trusted place to understand performance—and the confidence to act on it.

The challenge was not just organizing information. Teams needed consistent patterns, trusted data presentation, and clearer paths from summary-level insight into supporting detail.

What needed to change

Finance360 needed to reduce the effort it took to find, validate, and interpret financial information while maintaining enterprise design standards across internal and third-party experiences.

Information lived across disconnected tools and manual reports.
Teams spent extra time validating which data source to trust.
Interfaces lacked consistent hierarchy, terminology, and patterns.

Process Walkthrough

From disconnected reporting paths to a scalable finance decision experience.

Because the underlying business details are confidential, this walkthrough focuses on the design thinking: how I clarified workflows, shaped reusable patterns, and helped teams build trust in the information presented.

Understand where trust and momentum were breaking down.

I started by mapping how finance teams accessed, validated, and reported information across systems—looking for moments where users lost confidence, duplicated effort, or had to leave the experience to keep moving.

Interviewed stakeholders and finance users to understand decision-making needs.
Identified friction across reporting, approvals, and data validation workflows.
Documented inconsistencies in terminology, hierarchy, and UI patterns.

Manual validation creates delay

Need faster drill-down

Unclear source of truth

Reports feel disconnected

Approvals need visibility

Data confidence matters

Inconsistent labels

Executive summary view needed

Define the right experience priorities.

The goal was not just to create another dashboard. The platform needed to support different levels of decision-making with consistent, scalable patterns that helped leaders scan quickly and analysts investigate without losing context.

Prioritized role-based views for leaders, analysts, and operational teams.
Defined core journeys for monitoring, investigation, reporting, and approval.
Established design principles around clarity, trust, and progressive disclosure.

Finance Manager
Needs clarity, speed, and confidence

Quickly understand current performance.
Drill into exceptions without losing context.
Trust that metrics are consistent across views.

Translate complexity into clear product patterns.

I moved from workflow structure into high-fidelity UI, focusing on hierarchy, consistency, accessibility, and reusable components that could work across sensitive reporting, approvals, and third-party surfaces.

Created modular dashboard patterns for at-a-glance summaries and key insight moments.
Standardized tables, filters, status indicators, detail views, and AI insight entry points.
Aligned third-party UI and conversational patterns to enterprise design standards.

Carry design intent into implementation.

The final direction created a more cohesive way for teams to monitor financial performance, review activity, and move through decisions—while giving engineering and product partners reusable patterns that could scale beyond the initial release.

Partnered with engineering and product teams to support implementation.
Reviewed designs against enterprise standards and accessibility expectations.
Created reusable patterns that could scale across future workflows.

Key Decisions

Design choices that made the experience more trustworthy, usable, and scalable.

Prioritized summary before detail

Leaders needed fast confidence first, then a clear path to supporting detail when something required investigation.

Designed for trust in the data

Consistent terminology, hierarchy, and metric presentation helped reduce ambiguity across reporting views.

Created reusable workflow patterns

Tables, filters, approvals, and status states were designed as scalable patterns instead of one-off screens.

Aligned third-party experiences

Design governance helped integrated tools feel like part of the same ecosystem instead of separate products stitched together.

Impact

Improved clarity, consistency, and confidence in financial decision-making.

Because exact metrics and financial values are confidential, impact is described directionally using non-sensitive outcomes.

✓

Faster path to insight

Users could more quickly locate the information they needed and move from review to action.

✓

Less validation friction

Clearer hierarchy and consistent data presentation reduced the effort required to interpret and trust information.

✓

More scalable patterns

Reusable components and workflow patterns gave teams a stronger foundation for future finance experiences.

✓

Stronger cross-team alignment

Shared design direction helped internal and external teams deliver a more cohesive platform experience.

Finance360 turned complex financial workflows into a clearer, more trusted enterprise experience.

By aligning stakeholders, simplifying information architecture, and establishing consistent design patterns, the platform helped finance teams spend less effort navigating tools and more time making informed decisions.